Dukaan, a year-old startup that helps merchants in India set up digital stores quickly and easily using no-code tools, has received $11 million in funding. Plans are to expand the company’s offerings and expand more broadly in the South Asian market.
Safaricom’s flagship mobile money platform M-Pesa has hit 50 million active customers in Africa, boosting its position as the continent’s largest fintech company. M-Pesa is run by Safaricom and Vodacom and is now available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt. It provides customers with access to the widest agent network across the continent with more than 430,000 agent outlets and cashless payments in more than 400,000 businesses.
New report shows India with 140 million e-retail shoppers, just behind China and the U.S., with $38 billion total sales in the fiscal year ending March 2021. Projections are for India’s e-retail market to reach $120-$140 billion by 2026.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.